When Transgender Trumps Treachery

The fashion world has a new darling. She’s a size 4, counts Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette as her style icons and has “a flat stomach, great legs and curvy hips,” according to Vogue.

She also happens to have perpetrated one of the greatest leaks of classified government material in American history. But that’s not the primary concern of the breathless media coverage afforded Chelsea Manning, born Bradley.

Ms. Manning is the subject of a reverent profile and Annie Leibovitz photo spread in the September issue of Vogue, the magazine’s most important edition. The author, Nathan Heller, portrays the “graceful, blue-eyed” and unapologetic former Army private traipsing across Manhattan in a Gabriela Hearst dress and Dr. Martens, dispensing fashion tips like state secrets. (“I’ve been a huge fan of Marc Jacobs for many, many years,” she says. “He captures a kind of simplicity and a kind of beauty that I like — projecting strength through femininity.”) In a separate feature, the magazine took Ms. Manning vintage shopping as she assembled her “femme Johnny Cash” look. Not since Vogue published a piece about the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, “The Rose in the Desert,” for which it subsequently apologized and scrubbed from its website, has it celebrated such a morally compromised figure.

Anna Wintour’s glossy isn’t the only fashion outlet fascinated with Ms. Manning’s transition from soldier to advocate and from male to female. “I choose my lipstick colors carefully,” she says in an exclusive for Yahoo Beauty. “I’m not just saying, ‘I like this edgy color.’ This is an expression of my humanity. And beauty, to me, is self-expression.” On Instagram, Ms. Manning certainly expresses herself emphatically, posing with her boot stomping the camera and promising to “defend against fascism by any means necessary,” the violence-endorsing slogan of the antifa movement.

Ms. Manning also serves as artistic muse. On her website, the illustrator Molly Crabapple displays a florid birthday card she sent the imprisoned Ms. Manning three years ago. “We breathed the same air twice, at the courtroom in Fort Meade,” Ms. Crabapple wrote. At Greenwich Village’s Fridman Gallery, Ms. Manning is the subject of an exhibition in which the artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, rendered 3-D images of the former prisoner using DNA pulled from cheek swabs and hair samples she mailed from jail. Ted Hearne, the composer of an opera about Ms. Manning, “The Source,” which ran in San Francisco this year, insists she committed a “victimless crime.”

That’s not true. When Ms. Manning transmitted 750,000 secret military records and State Department cables to WikiLeaks in 2010, she not only jeopardized continuing missions and disrupted American diplomacy. She also put an untold number of innocent people’s lives in danger.

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Chelsea Manning one day after being released from military prison.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images

According to The New Yorker, when the United States tried to locate “hundreds” of Afghans named in the documents and move them to safety, “many could not be found, or were in environments too dangerous to reach.” When pressed by a journalist about the possibility of redacting the names of Afghans who cooperated with the United States military, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, reportedly replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Meantime, Mr. Assange gave a Russian Holocaust denier 90,000 of the cables. That man, who goes by the pen name Israel Shamir, delivered a trove to the Belarussian dictatorship, which then utilized the material to detain opposition activists. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe used a leaked cable detailing a United States Embassy meeting with opposition figures as pretext for an investigation into “treasonous collusion.”

Yet from the moment United States military prosecutors charged Ms. Manning with violating the Espionage Act in 2010, progressives have hailed her as a folk hero. She became an even more sympathetic figure when, shortly after her sentencing three years later, she announced she was transgender and wished to be known as Chelsea. The day of her discharge from prison this May following a commutation of her sentence by President Barack Obama, Laura Poitras, the activist filmmaker who assisted Edward Snowden in his leak of highly classified information, announced she would produce a film about Ms. Manning titled “XY Chelsea.” Amnesty International — an organization ostensibly committed to freeing political prisoners, not those who assist their jailers — gushed that “people power can triumph over injustice.”

More troubling than this fawning from avowed enemies of the American “security state” is Ms. Manning’s embrace by large swaths of the L.G.B.T. community. At the New York City Pride March in June, thousands cheered as Ms. Manning sat atop the American Civil Liberties Union float. While in prison, she had repeatedly been named honorary grand marshal of San Francisco’s gay pride celebration. She has also been the subject of constant, adulatory coverage in gay media.

Celebrating Chelsea Manning just a few years after gay and transgender people were permitted to serve openly in the military discredits the L.G.B.T. cause. Throughout most of the 20th century, homosexuality was associated with treason and used as a basis for purging gay people from government jobs, denying them security clearances and restricting their service in the armed forces. The decision by Ms. Manning’s defense team to argue that untreated gender dysphoria was a factor in her decision to leak classified information unwittingly aids those who say that L.G.B.T. people cannot be trusted in sensitive government jobs. And it dishonors the L.G.B.T. people who have served in the military throughout history without betraying their country.

It would be hard to find a less convincing advocate for transgender military service than someone convicted of violating the Espionage Act. The cognitive dissonance required of L.G.B.T. activists in celebrating Ms. Manning while denouncing Donald Trump’s transgender military ban is considerable, not least in the case of Ms. Manning herself, who simultaneously condemns the ban while also tweeting that “we need to dismantle the military/police state,” without appearing to recognize the contradiction. (Ms. Manning is a prolific Tweeter whose blithe, emoji-laden missives read like the doodles of a freshman peace studies major and belie her portrayal as the moral conscience of our time.)

Ms. Manning’s enduring popularity with progressives is also puzzling given WikiLeaks’ role in the 2016 presidential campaign season, when Julian Assange and his organization acted as a conduit for the dissemination of emails pilfered from leading Democrats by Russian hackers. Not only did Ms. Manning violate her oath by assuming the right to determine what classified information should be made public, but she also did so in cooperation with a megalomaniac who would go on to play an outsize role ensuring Mr. Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton.

There are elements of the American left that would celebrate any leaker of government secrets, regardless of their gender identity. But it’s hard to imagine Ms. Manning receiving such a positive reception — never mind a spread in Vogue — if she still identified as Bradley, transgender being the liberal cause du jour. Ms. Manning’s atypical identity adds a frisson of subversion to her already subversive acts. Transgender, it would appear, trumps treachery.

James Kirchick (@jkirchick) is a visiting fellow with the Brookings Institution and the author of “The End of Europe.” He is at work on a history of gay Washington, D.C.